Uploading Photos

You can upload photos to accompany your posts on the forum.This feature is a lot like a simple version of Flickr or Photobucket that is built into YLF for your convenience.

What you Need

In order to use this feature, the following must be true:

You must be a signed up YLF member and you must be at the “active member” level or higher. Note that this level is very easy to reach and most people do so in about one week after signing up.

You must have photos on your computer’s hard drive that you want to use in your post. If you took the photos you want to post with your digital camera then you need to transfer them to your hard drive before you can post them on YLF.

You must have Javascript enabled on your browser. If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry. Most people have it enabled already.

If all these things are true then you will see a square area with the text “Add a Photo” just below the place where you type the content of your forum post.

Three Simple Steps

Whether you are replying on a thread or starting a new conversation on the forum, adding a photo to your post is a simple three step process:

Click in the square labeled “Add a Photo”

Use the dialog box that appears to select a photo on your hard drive

Wait for the photo to upload

You can type your post while you wait for the photo to upload. Once the photo thumbnail has appeared in the square area you can go ahead and submit the post. Other members of the forum will then see the thumbnail below your post, and if they click on the thumbnail a larger version of the photo will appear.

Troubleshooting

Here are some tips to deal with common photo uploading problems:

My photos take too long to upload: Photos taken by digital cameras are very large files (typically 10,000 times the size of the text in an average forum post). One way to make uploading much faster is to reduce the size of the photo using your computer before you upload it to YLF. You can do this using commercial photo editing software (like Photoshop Elements) or even the utilities that are built into Windows and Mac OS X.

I get an error saying that my photos are too large: There is a limit on the size of photos that YLF can handle. This is larger than most people will need, but if you do take your photos with a very high end camera or in the uncompressed RAW format, then your photos may end up too large. In this case you have to reduce the size of the photo before uploading.

My photo uploads start uploading, but something goes wrong: The YLF photo uploading system has been tested on the latest versions of Internet Explorer 8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. If you aren’t using the latest version of your browser then you might find that simply upgrading your browser solves your photo uploading problems.

I see the message “Please enable JavaScript…” in the forum: You need to enable Javascript in your browser. All modern browsers have this as a setting (for example, in Firefox it is in the Firefox menu under “Preferences → Content”). If all this sounds too technical, then please ask your go-to technical support person for help.

Still No Luck?

If you are still unable to upload photos, then let us know using the contact form. Be sure to describe the steps you took when you tried to upload photos and mention the name and version number of the browser you were using.